(EdSource) by Carolyn Jones
Educators were cheering over newly released results from the College Board showing significant increases in the number of females, Latino and African-American students who took either the Advanced Placement computer science exam or the new computer science principles exam this spring.
“I am over the moon. These numbers are amazing,” said Hadi Partovi, chief executive of Code.org, a nonprofit that provides free coding instruction to students around the world and has advocated for greater diversity in the computer science field. “This is a great reflection on the U.S. public school system. Every American should be proud — the U.S. is really leading the way.”
Of the 111,262 high school students who took the College Board’s Advanced Placement computer science exams in May, 27 percent were girls, a jump from 23 percent last year. Twenty percent of the test-takers were Latino or African-American, up from 15 percent in 2016.
The increases are largely due to a new AP computer science class launched in 2016-17 that focuses less on Java coding and more on what the College Board describes as the “big ideas” behind computer science, such as how the Internet works, the global impact of technology, big data and cyber security, and the creative aspects of programming.
